I'm feeling compelled to make a post to explain why I've been blogging so much more frequently lately, I've written a lot already about pulling back from social media, and that explains part of it. The other part of it is that I've given up drinking. Not cold turkey or anything, but I've cut back so much that I think it's safe to place myself into the non-drinker category. For context, I think I was drinking enough before to safely place myself in the "borderline alcoholic" category, so it's a pretty big change.
I know a lot of us started to drink more heavily during the initial years of the COVID 19 pandemic, I don't think we need to go into the details of why since the pandemic never really ended, governments just pretended it did, so everyone has had plenty of reasons. That said, I don't think looking back at my recollections of consumption I really thought I had a problem. It certainly seems like a lot now, in hindsight, but at the time I was comparing myself to hardcore alcoholics who were drinking 14 cocktails a night, or going through a 30 pack of beers in a weekend. "I never hit my wife or yelled at my kids so I'm good right?", but there were red flags that I was ignoring.
I guess that's one of the side effects of being a functioning alcoholic, everything is sort of bland and gray and dull, even red flags don't stand out. They blend into the background with everything else while you stand there and let life pass you by. The most obvious one was that I was cagey about exactly how much I was drinking. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't hiding bottles in weird places, in fact my liquor cabinet was displayed prominently, but it's like I was hiding in plain sight. No one but me and the guys who worked down at the ABC knew how frequently I was replacing those bottles. Which was another red flag, all of the ABC cashiers at the three locations nearest my house knew me.
For me though, the biggest red flag that I ignored for years was stomach problems. When I first started drinking back in college I noticed that one of my typical hangover symptoms was that I'd be gassy and have a bit of a stomach ache. At the time I just wrote it off at a side effect of cheap beer, and back then I drank very infrequently, only at parties but often way too much (ooh look, another red flag) so by the time I'd gotten to my mid 30s and was drinking every day I'd forgotten that alcohol made me queasy and I really honestly thought that waking up each morning feeling bloated was just my normal. So I kept drinking more and not thinking about it, until around a year ago I finally got scared enough to go see a doctor for the first time since my mid 20s really, I figured I must have colon cancer, so a couple of days before the visit I stopped drinking.
Literally the first day I woke up feeling great, no stomach pain, same thing the day of my doctors visit. I went in anyway and told him about my stomach problems and how I'd noticed the issue in my 20s (when I started drinking, a duh) and had a colonoscopy but at the time I didn't want to tell my Muslim doctor who was also a good friend of my Muslim family that I (an agnostic atheist) had been drinking so they said that I must be lactose intolerant, but I noticed the problem seemed to go away when I stopped drinking. I want to thank my new doctor for not looking at me like I was the worlds biggest idiot when he said, "you should stick to that for a while and see how it goes".
So that was almost a year ago now and the stomach problems are gone and I feel pretty great, and now that I'm living in the moment and not just numbing myself all the time I see how much I've been missing. It's bittersweet because I can't get back lost time, but I'm glad that I was able to come back to be around for my wife and kids. Because even though I wasn't physically abusing them, being buzzed and not present all of the time was almost as bad. I'm looking forward to spending more time with them and experiencing life vibrantly in real time.